Book Reviews: March 2016 Picture Book Roundup: Spring Has Sprung

Hoppi the bunny is just old enough to participate in the bunnies’ annual Easter egg challenge where the best egg wins a chance to help the Easter Bunny with his deliveries. Hoppi wants to win, but he is discouraged when he sees all of the amazing eggs being made by the older bunnies: chocolate, wood, flower planters, engraved, with a painted portrait of the Easter Bunny…. Each of these adults kindly donates some of their tools to Hoppi’s egg efforts. Wandering through the woods, Hoppi witnesses a robin’s egg knocked from its nest. Unable to return the egg to its nest, the robin mother entrusts the egg to Hoppi who volunteers to protect it. He does so faithfully, a proper Horton. He is missed at the Easter celebration when the Easter Bunny pulls up in his carriage pulled by hens, but the Easter Bunny knows what he’s been up to: He goes into the woods and returns with Hoppi, the winner of his contest, and his newly hatched robin chick. Hoppi’s self-sacrifice and faithfulness are rewarded and recognized with the prize that he coveted most. This was a great opportunity for Jan Brett to show off her distinctive, lauded illustration style with its magical details and high realism matched with whimsy.

Mimicking if not outright borrowing illustrations from Beatrix Potter’s classic works, Peter Rabbit leads the reader past other classic characters of Potter’s to see—surprise!—the newly hatching ducklings of Jemima Puddle-Duck’s. I don’t generally like these books that hijack classic characters for new stories, but this was a cute concept. There is little to the story, really, but that leaves the focus on the illustrations, and because the illustrations are what of the story are most Potter’s that seems fitting.

The text on each page gives instructions to pull a tab, which separates two halves of an Easter egg to reveal a baby animal. The last page reveals a mirror. The tabs are of a sturdy cardboard that seems like it will be difficult to tear. This is a novel sort of interactive page and that I think gives the book merit. I especially like the inclusion of the mirror. I think this book is actually meant for younger than Macmillan believes; I would say it’s intended audience is children younger than 2.

***1/2

Any Day Books

The Vicar of Nibbleswicke by Roald Dahl and illustrated by Quentin Blake. Trumpet-Scholastic, 1996. First published 1991. Intended audience: Ages 11-13.

I’m not entirely sure whether or not to include to this book in this list. This is more of 31 page (23 pages of text and not all of those are full pages), illustrated novelette or short story, but I don’t have enough to say on it to write a full review, I don’t think. This was written for the benefit of the Dyslexia Institute. It reads as Dahl having fun with himself and with his characters and with language. He even makes a reference to another book of his, Esio Trot. The Reverend Lee suffers and has suffered since childhood from a strange back-to-front dyslexia, where he occasionally says a word backwards without realizing it. This manifestation of dyslexia does not exist, so this really does not promote understanding or acceptance of dyslexia so much as it borrows the name and invents a nonexistent symptom. It leaves me in a very strange position because on the one hand I want to applaud Dahl funding research for a disability and on the other I want to berate him for spouting lies about an illness. The words that Reverend Lee says backwards are of course mostly those that when said backwards become other words and those words are often insulting. Miss Prewt becomes Miss Twerp. Instead of happily exclaiming that all of the ladies knit, he says that each of them stinks. God is replaced with dog, which for a vicar is problematic. In a First Communion class the reverend tells his parishioners to pis from the Communion cup. Parishioners are also told not to krap along the narrow drive to the church. The misspelled cuss words are something to keep in mind when deciding whether or not to recommend this book to certain individuals. I giggled to myself as I read it silently and alone. There wasn’t a great deal of substance there, but there was word play, and I am a sucker for clever word play—though this is very mischievous word play.

Rabbit’s carrot collection has outgrown his warren. He abandons his warren to his collection and goes to stay with friends, but he doesn’t want to be entirely without his carrots, and each time he moves into a new friend’s place, he brings just enough carrots to destroy his friend’s home and leave both of them without a place to stay. His friends are extraordinarily patient, continuing to take in Rabbit, his carrots, and the friends that he has made homeless with his hoarding and stubbornness. His friends as they move like refugees to each new home recognize Rabbit’s problem and politely suggest that he not bring that last carrot into their new refuge, but they don’t outright confront him. It is only when Rabbit has run out of friends and his friends have run out of homes that he recognizes the trouble that he has caused and seeks to fix it. He invites his friends back to his home: the last home that has not been destroyed and they eat their way through the carrots to make enough space for them all. Rabbit realizes that carrots are meant to be shared rather than hoarded. While there are some important lessons here about sharing and about hoarding and about selfishness, the story itself is problematic. These poor creatures have their houses destroyed—and some of them are injured—for being open and generous; they’re understanding is never addressed as a problem. This rabbit never really apologizes for what he has done. Sharing his home and his carrots become more reward than penance so where is the consequence to himself for his selfishness? The illustrations, it should be said, are adorable even as the poor turtle is bandaged and on crutches. Hudson mixes whimsy and realism and cartoonishness well and the colors are vibrant and inviting.

The illustrations in this book are vibrant and beautiful. The story takes place in one of the older cities, Hoot and Peep’s home being in a Gothic cathedral, possibly in Paris or London. That I can make a guess should give you an idea of the detail that Judge lovingly puts into each drawing. The story is a cute story of sibling relationship and of acceptance of otherness and uniqueness, where the older owl Hoot believes that his sister Peep is singing wrong because she is singing differently than Hoot has been taught to do. Ultimately, Hoot realizes that he misses his sister’s unique voice and he goes to her to learn her ways. The book uses some very fun onomatopoeias. It’s definitely a book appropriate for a younger audience, but my audience was maybe six to nine and they really seemed to enjoy it as well.

This is a touch-and-feel animal and animal sounds primer. The illustrations combine blocks of bright color, colored fingerprints, and photographs: sheep made of cauliflowers heads and hedgehogs made of bright dalias. These were creative illustrations, and I appreciated that. There weren’t really that many opportunities for touch-and-feel elements (there weren’t many pages) and what were there were pretty humdrum.

Uni is an extraordinarily beautiful unicorn but she is nevertheless an outcast among unicorn society because she believes that little girls are real and that one day she will get to meet one, but she doesn’t let the other unicorns derision, even that of her parents, dissuade her from her belief. “Far, far away (but not too far)” there is a little girl who believes the same about unicorns and is equally ridiculed. The two never meet but they live in their separate realities each believing in the other. This is one of those books that I enjoyed subjectively as a girl who likes to believe in the existence of this sort of benign, escapist magic and who has been dismissed as dewy-eyed. Objectively, taking a step back, I see the faults here. I recognize that Barrager needed to choose just one little girl to be the character in Uni’s fantasies and the heroine of her own reality, but did she need to choose Barbie? She—almost impossibly long of lock, blonde, and blue eyed—has for too long been the ideal, the fantasy of little girls. We didn’t need another fairy tale lifting up this unrealistic ideal. I liked the writing—the technical skill of it—as I often do with Rosenthal, and I liked the story. Most of my complaint here is with Barrager.

***

What Do You Do with an Idea? by Kobi Yamada and illustrated by Mae Besom. Compendium, 2014.

This is one of the better metaphors for an idea and description of the growth of an idea that I have seen. The young egg appears—poof—and follows the boy around. Though the others don’t understand, and they reject the idea, and the boy tries to leave it behind, it persists till the boy becomes fond of the idea and nurtures it privately. Then one day the egg hatches, and the idea is set free into the world where it is now not just part of the boy but part of everything.

At the beginning of the book, the idea is the only thing with a spot of color. As the boy accepts the idea and begins to nurture it, he gains color too. The last page is bright.

Having had experiences with ideas very like this, though mine have never been yet set out into the wide world, I appreciate this book on a very personal level. I feel as if this might actually be a better picture book for adults and graduates and aspiring artists than for children. I read this alongside Hoot and Peep, and I don’t think my audience enjoyed it as much as Hoot and Peep, but they were engaged. They were the ones who noticed the plethora of new ideas on the final pages. They guessed that the pages would grow more and more colorful.

*****

These reviews are not endorsed by any of the authors or publishers or anyone else involved in the making of these books. They are independent, honest reviews by a reader.

About Kathryn

My love of books has been carefully cultivated by the adults who raised me and also by the friends who love to share. My life has led me down long library shelves, to online forums, fanfiction sites, the front of a lecture hall, and into the desks of college classrooms. With an English degree and a couple master’s classes in Children’s Literature, I am now a bookseller for Barnes & Noble. I have been an editor for Wizarding Life Networks (the people who brought you Wizarding Life, Panem October, and MyHogwarts now HogwartsIsHere).